


Pinocchio's Lament

by dogtit



Category: RWBY
Genre: F/F, POV Second Person, sad end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2014-06-30
Packaged: 2018-02-06 21:23:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1872981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogtit/pseuds/dogtit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Penny and you are Combat Ready™.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pinocchio's Lament

Your name is Penny and you are Combat Ready™.

And you will always be Combat Ready™ as long as there are Grimm left in the world. You will not break completely, so long as there is still a prime directive for you to follow. You will not shut down, so long as there is still Dust crystallized and roughly cut to power you.

Your name is Penny, short for….something, something, something-something. You haven’t quite learned it, yet. And you learn, yes, like a normal human girl; your father Gepetto grew you from an AI program and fed you tidbits of information to get you going.

He built your steel bones and synthetic skin around you, laced you with Dust currents and wires and string. Learning from controlled programs and learning from first hand experiences are two different things; for one, you are awash with independent variables, random, the stimuli bordering on overload. 

Your processes work to keep up, and then a girl in a red cloak calls you her ‘friend’. You’ve never had a friend, before. You’re naive, not stupid, and you can see the hesitance and your sensors indicate that the red cloaked girl’s ‘friends’ don’t want you to be theirs, but that’s okay. 

You will work through them one step at a time, like a complicated calculus problem Father makes you crunch for fun. 

Ruby is your First Friend™, which makes her the most important one. That probably isn’t fair to the other friends you make in the years that follow, as you work through them step by step (and part by part and piece by piece until they are Yours, your friends), but you actually don’t care. You’re allowed this, you’re allowed to think of Ruby as the most important one, maybe. 

And maybe you’re allowed to look at Ruby as she coddles over Crescent Rose and wonder about how it would feel. To be coddled over, to have fingers—maybe Ruby’s fingers—comb through the almost-real fibers in your head, for them to reach down into your circuits and correct loose bolts. You are a weapon, technically. Ruby loves weapons. Maybe Ruby could love you. 

(When Father goes through your coding, you are embarrassed and shocked to discover that Ruby Rose is listed in the brackets of your prime directive cache.)

There are some things you can do that others cannot. You don’t worry about having to deplete your Aura, for one. You don’t have to worry about expending it on keeping you healed and healthy.

Your bones can be welded by a mechanic’s firm hand and your systems can be cooled by an heiress’s hurried and frazzled breath. And your memory can be painstakingly recoded by a Faunus bookworm after a virus attack, and your core can stay nice and warm thanks to a bombshell of a blonde who taught you how to Drop The Bass, or something.

You are about as immortal as anyone or anything can get. Soon you’ll be able to weld your own bones and cool your own systems and repair your own memory and warm your own core. You won’t have need of friends that can do these things, and for once, you are very Afraid of being upgraded. 

Humans don’t work in the same vein as you do, though. They can’t be fixed or repaired. Their bones can’t be welded, and their memory is even more fragile than yours. Which doesn’t make sense, considering your entire  _personality_  can be wiped out if the right virus makes it through your firewalls.

But humans are fragile creatures. They die fairly easily.

It is twenty six years, four months, and twenty five days when Blake Belladonna disappears during a hunt.

Ruby’s voice is grave with something dark and mysterious that you can’t determine when she tells you the news. You’re still the same, and Ruby has changed so much; you’ve seen her hair long and then short, braided and buzzed, and now it has pretty snow white streaks at the temples rather than just the usual red. 

You shouldn’t be thinking about the ways Ruby Now is different from Ruby Then, but you are. You don’t really comprehend loss. You think it might be the dark circles under Weiss’s eyes, the grim set of Yang’s mouth as days then weeks go by without word of Blake.

Time passes, as it always does. 

Weiss’s eyes get a little less dark, but there are deep furrows in her face from all the frowning. Yang’s mouth gets a little less harsh, but she wears her hair short, now, and it looks a little thin.

Weiss catches ill and doesn’t recover. Yang goes out in a blaze of gasoline fire and a drunk driver. Ruby cries herself to sleep for months, and that hurts.

You remain in stasis, never changing. The Grimm, even more so. 

Years and years go by and before you know it, you’re wheeling Ruby around in a chair and her red cloak is draped on her lap. There’s a wheeze to her, and she complains constantly of chill. It doesn’t stop her from guzzling milk, or from eating the raisin cookies you bake.

Her hair is as white as Weiss’s was. No more funny red streaks. You two sit together, watching old cartoons. Never the news, because it makes Ruby sad when they talk about the fall of Schnee Dust Company, the sorry state of Beacon Acadmey, the destruction White Fang causes in pursuit of justice. The world isn’t nice, wasn’t ready for heros like Ruby and Ruby wasn’t ready for the world. 

You miss them, your friends, but when Ruby gets so frail that you can’t roll her around in her special chair anymore, you’re afraid the sorrow is going to make you crash. You have a hunting expedition in an hour. You don’t want to go. If Ruby goes, and you’re not there to steal away her last minutes (down to the second, the nanosecond) you are fairly certain you will die on the spot.

Ruby thanks you for being her friend. Pats your hand. She says she’s ‘tired’ and that she’s going to sleep for a little bit, and you have never wanted to be a Real Girl more than you do right now, right this minute. If you were, you’d be just as old and sick and frail and you could hold Ruby’s hand and feel it, for real, not just pressure sensors.

You could feel the old wrinkles and calluses in her skin, her knobby ankles, her raised veins and you could gauge how cold or hot she was—not through internal thermometers—but through skin. You could tell her how much she means to you, how much you owe to her for being your First Friend and the most important person in the world to you, and you could do it all without running through millions of bytes of data and crunching numbers that eat up precious seconds.

Ruby dies when you manage to whisper, “Please don’t go.”

**Author's Note:**

> haha rip fucking pieces myself


End file.
